In my last post, I talked about the principle that structures can carry meaning, and I gave the examples of a couple of sentence types: tag questions and the cleft construction. In this post I want to talk about the structural meaning of a couple of rhetorical figures. My goal, if I ever reach it, … Continue reading Meaning and Rhetoric

How do words mean? How do sentences mean? How do novels mean? Without getting into the thicket of these very complex questions, I would say that linguists have developed a considerable (but not complete) understanding of how words and sentences mean. But linguists usually stop with sentences; they don’t ask how paragraphs mean, let alone … Continue reading How does a novel mean?

In these posts I want to give an overview of the four aspects of philology: historical linguistics, the editing of texts, the interpretation of meaning in context, and literary criticism with a particular attention to language. I haven't posted on the editing of texts yet, but that will come in a week or two. This … Continue reading English as a Germanic Language, #1

In my previous post I presented a catalogue of rhetorical figures in Ellen Glasgow’s The Romantic Comedians, with an example of each. A more detailed catalogue would show that Glasgow uses most of these figures just once or twice or three times, but she uses antithesis frequently. In this post I want to look at … Continue reading Antitheses in Ellen Glasgow’s The Romantic Comedians

This week I want to look at some aspects of style in a novel by Ellen Glasgow, The Romantic Comedians. Glasgow was born in 1873 and died in 1945; she lived in Virginia, and she was a good friend of James Branch Cabell. She wrote a lot and she won a Pulitzer Prize, so she … Continue reading Rhetorical Figures in Ellen Glasgow’s The Romantic Comedians

This week I happened to reread Malcolm Lowrey’s Under the Volcano, which I last read probably forty years ago or more. It’s not one of my favourite books, but many people like it a lot, and I’m not writing this blog to give my opinions. Whether I like it or not, I grant that it’s … Continue reading Plangent, Ostiole, and Winze

Etymological Entertainments #3 Today I want to talk a little more about phonotactics, that is, the rules of sound combination in various languages. In an earlier post (“Etymological Entertainments #2”) I noted that when we say the English word “pterodactyl” we don’t pronounce the initial “p”—we say “teradactyl”. The initial cluster “pt” is not allowed … Continue reading Pneumonia, Amnesia, and Knee

Some years back, when my mother was still alive, I called her one day to find out how she was doing. “I’m a little tired today,” she said, “because I didn’t get much sleep last night.” What kept you up? I asked. “Well,” she answered, “you know I always read a little bit before I … Continue reading Lost in a Book

By the end of this post I want to get to the word helicopter, but first I will consider a different group of words: telephone, telegraph, telegram, telescope, and so on. These are all compound words, and it’s easy to see the parts of the compounds: the first part is tele and the second part is, respectively, phone, graph, gram, and scope. … Continue reading Etymological Entertainments #2

Etymology, the history of words, is entertaining and informative. It’s entertaining to find out that the word idiosyncrasy is formed from three Greek roots: idio- (personal, private, one’s own), syn (together), and krasis (a mixture, a blend)—so an idiosyncrasy is the personal things you have mixed together. The word idiot comes from the Greek idiôtês, a private person, a person who keeps to himself, a … Continue reading Etymological Entertainments #1